Medieval Spanish Drama: Present Knowledge and Future Prospects

Drama in medieval Spain has been studied very little. Even when English scholars in the early twentieth century looked abroad to find parallels with Middle English cycles, they looked more to France and Germany then to Spain. There were plays in Spain in the medieval period, though no complete extant cycle survives. In Seville there are documents which record the use of pageants and the representation of certain characters, both biblical and allegorical. However, in Spain there is a well-established tradition of religious procession, and in Seville the processions of the Holy Week are organised by guilds, some of which still have trade affiliations. It is possible that these processions still maintain some of the principles of staging used at earlier periods. This is an aspect of drama that needs investigating, and it is possible that a search through Spanish archives, which have hardly been tapped as yet, could yield many interesting points of comparison with the drama in other countries, particularly England.